How to Write a Shopify Product Description that Sell

The importance of writing effective product descriptions

Writing a good product description is a step not to be neglected when you put a product online, as it can considerably help you sell more, improve your SEO and build trust with your consumers.

A positive impact on sales 

Crafting well-written product descriptions can enhance your sales, as they play a crucial role in convincing potential customers to transition from browsing to purchasing your products. 

In fact, you can think of product descriptions as a digital sales representative for your online store! They provide essential details and information about the product’s features, benefits, and uses, and sometimes even tell a story, or trigger an emotion, thereby helping potential customers understand the value of what they’re considering to buy. 

It improves SEO 

As well as helping your customers, you’ll also be helping search engines find and rank your product pages when using relevant keywords. Effective SEO and relevant keywords will help you rank higher in search engine results, ultimately attracting more traffic to your website. 

It reduces customer queries and builds trust

Providing your customers with comprehensive and useful information about your products can greatly reduce any potential questions they may have. By providing insightful, well-considered details in your product description, you ensure that all necessary information is readily available. This approach also helps in building trust with your customers as it offers a complete view of your product, simplifying their decision-making process. In addition to this, detailed and accurate product descriptions will help the visualization and understanding of the product, resulting in fewer product returns.

Best practices to write effective product descriptions on Shopify

We're going to give you lots of tips and things to consider if you want to write the best product description to boost your sales. However, before jumping into each of these tips, the first step is to ask yourself a few questions to ensure you’re writing the most effective product descriptions possible. 

• Who are your buyer personas – A buyer persona is a research-based, semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data such as customer demographics, online behavior but also their preferences, motivations and concerns.

• How did this potential customer land on your page? 

• What is his general interest? 

• What specific aspects of your ecommerce store might appeal to this individual? 

• How would customers describe the products to a friend?

• Which features or benefits would most attract this potential customer? What makes the product special?

Keep those questions in mind when writing your product descriptions. Writing a product description really is an important step, given that 87% of consumers consider that product content is the most important factor when buying a product online, as they can’t physically see, touch or feel the product. 

Understand your target audience

To write an effective description, you fundamentally need to know your potential consumers. Not only do you need to know what they're looking for in a product, but also how they'll scan your description. To propose a description that resonates with them, addressing their specific needs and highlighting the benefits they care about most. By speaking their language and empathizing with their challenges, you can connect with your audience on a deeper level, enhancing trust and boosting conversion rates.

Use clear and concise language

To ensure that your message is understood by everyone, use clear language and be specific. If your description is too long, or if you use complex words or jargon, you’ll lose potential customers’ interests as they read on. 

To keep your customers engaged and interested in reading your description, consider implementing the following tactics: 

Bullet points: Using bullet points helps to organize your content, highlight key information and remove superfluous content. It makes your content shorter and easier to read.

Sensory words: By using sensory words, you can enhance a product's appeal and help build a vivid picture in the customers’ mind. Sensory words also help to humanize your product descriptions. For example, describing a food item as 'crunchy' or 'smooth' gives the reader a tangible sense of what to expect from the product, making it more appealing. Here are some examples of sensory words. 

• Sight: glossy, vibrant…

• Sound: silence, whisper…

• Touch: rough, silky…

• Smell: fresh, fragrant…

• Taste: spicy, bitter…

Power words: Appeal to potential buyers by using power words that can trigger an emotional or psychological response, making them highly persuasive. For example, words like 'exclusive', 'limited', 'innovative', 'revolutionary', and 'premium' can make your product seem more appealing and valuable for customers. 

Social proof

Showcase the feedback from past customers through reviews, ratings and comments, so that potential buyers can have an external opinion and experience of the product. When they see positive reviews, it encourages potential buyers to make a purchase, as they can see that others have tried the product and found it satisfactory. This strategy leverages the power of social proof, making new customers more comfortable and confident in their decision to buy.

For this bike on State Bicycle Co’s website, former consumers can add ratings and reviews, providing feedback and images for potential buyers.

SEO

Don't be afraid to add relevant keywords, so that search engines can rank you and increase the traffic to your product page. Properly optimized product descriptions can significantly enhance your online visibility and boost sales. To improve your SEO performance, here are some suggestions we recommend:

• Do keywords research: To ensure your products appear in search results, it’s essential to conduct keyword research. Indeed, by knowing the terms used by your target audience when looking at products similar to yours, you’ll be able to use them in your Shopify product description to rank on search engines. 

• Use your keywords in the title tag and meta description: Incorporating your researched keywords into the title tag and meta description is crucial for improving search engine rankings. This strategy not only enhances visibility but also increases the likelihood of attracting clicks from your target audience.

• Efficient and clean product URL: A well-formatted URL that is short, uses hyphens for spaces and includes the keywords can significantly improve your product’s visibility on search engines. It provides both users and search engines with clear information about the page content. Furthermore, a clean and concise URL structure can enhance user experience, making it easier for visitors to navigate your website and locate the products they're interested in. 

• Internal links: Creating internal links between product pages on your ecommerce store is a valuable strategy for indicating to search engine crawlers that these pages hold significant value. Crawlers are software applications used by search engines to index the content of websites across the internet. With this tactic, you can enhance the visibility of your product page and its ranking on search engines. 

• Improve loading time: Ensure that the loading time of your product page is fast on both mobile and other devices, to deliver an optimal shopping experience to your customers. 

High-quality images

Use beautiful, high-quality images to give consumers a glimpse of what the product looks like. It's very important to have images of your products to offer your customers some visualization of what they want to buy, since they can't physically touch or see the product. Having high-quality images will also add value to your products, making them more desirable to consumers.

Benefits vs features

Highlight both the features and the benefits derived from those features. On one hand, features are factual statements about a product, such as specifications, dimensions, or special functions that your product can perform. On the other hand, benefits explain how these features add value to the customer or solve their problems.

For this sunscreen, the brand has chosen to highlight important features of the product such as UV protection, hypoallergenic properties etc., and then they displayed complementary information.

Storytelling

Create a special bond with your consumers using storytelling. It can involve sharing the product's origin story or its creation process, adding authenticity and value. Storytelling can also highlight alignment with the customer's values, such as environmental conservation for eco-friendly products. This tactic can increase the value of a product by up to 2.7%.

In this product description, we can immediately see storytelling about the creation of this fragrance and its inspiration in Greece.

Another very good example of storytelling is with the Surly Bikes brand, which uses both humor and words to help customers create mental pictures.

Try it out and see how it performs

Finally, to see what works for your business, it’s crucial to test and optimize your product descriptions. You can use A/B testing, where you test different versions of a product description to see which gets the most sales, thereby gaining insights into your target customers' preferences and anticipations.

Shopify product description AI generator

If you don't have the time to write your own product descriptions, you can always use an AI product description generator. By inputting key product features, the generator crafts compelling narratives that highlight the value of your products. There are several generators you can use, such as: 

• Shopify magic

• Copy ai

• Jasper 

• Writesonic

These tools are designed to save you time, while still ensuring that your product descriptions are persuasive and engaging. They use artificial intelligence technology to understand your product features and translate them into enticing descriptions that can drive conversions. Whether you're selling apparel, electronics, or any other product, these generators can be a valuable tool.

Conclusion

By implementing well thought product descriptions, you’ll elevate your Shopify ecommerce and enhance your customers’ shopping experience. To achieve these benefits, you will need to take several aspects into account to optimize your current descriptions such as having a storytelling, a good SEO, high-quality images and a clear and concise message. Remember, your goal is to convince potential buyers that your product is the solution they've been looking for. So, invest time in perfecting your product descriptions, and watch how they transform the success of your Shopify store!